Description

You are a bold swordsman, penetrating deep within the monster-infested depths of the sinister wizard Zagor's catacomb fortress inside Firetop Mountain. With your wits, your blade, and more than a bit of luck, you will come out on top against fantastic enemies and strange magic, overcoming the warlock's hold on the countryside and making off with his legendary treasure hoard!

For your portable-gaming convenience, this means that this pilot project (sadly, it seems, inadequately commercially successful to inspire subsequent adaptations) incorporates huge swathes of text from the original 1982 Fighting Fantasy gamebook #1's famous 400 paragraphs, as well as many of the original black-and-white illustrations once gracing its pages. What it amounts to are descriptions of rooms and their contents, concluded with a multiple-choice list of options -- some of which yield surprisingly positive outcomes, some which dish up pain and suffering, and some of which are just time-wasting dead ends.

The gamebooks' elements of randomness are handled through automatic die-rolls here, the computer acting as a virtual accountant keeping tabs on the ebbs and flows of your trademark SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK scores and managing them both in and out of combat situations. Inventory is similarly tracked automatically, as well as the book-holder's option to "cheat" -- blocking options whose necessary conditions have not yet been met and doling out a measured three flip-backs, "undo" moves permitting retraction to a previous paragraph. (There is no option to simulate a reader's flipping through the book with a handful of fingers crammed in various locations to mark the spots of important crossroads 8)